Mojo - April 2007

The little-known Office of Special Counsel is preparing to investigate the various nefarious dealings of Karl Rove. Liberals rejoice.

The investigation, which will be bolstered in clout and credibility because it is coming from within the administration and not from Congressional Democrats, will look into "the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities."

The 106-person Office of Special Counsel has never conducted such a broad and high-profile inquiry in its history. One of its primary missions has been to enforce the Hatch Act, a law enacted in 1939 to preserve the integrity of the civil service....

"We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. "We will not leave any stone unturned."

Update: Commenter dmh has a very astute point that I want to draw everyone's attention to: "Rove can now say that he is unable to answer any questions about any of these matters because they are now the subject of a criminal investigation. Is that a good result?"

I'm not sure this investigation is criminal, but no doubt the actions of the Office of Special Counsel will be used as cover by Rove and embattled PR flacks across the Bush Administration. If this investigation drags on and on, allowing Rove to not answer questions about his conduct, while never producing any results, I'm going to wonder if it was orchestrated by the White House to dupe us all. How Rovian would that be?

[Editor's Note: Hey Jonathan, you should also direct people to Dan's great story on the OSC, which is about the dark side of Scott Bloch and his obsession on rooting out "the homosexual agenda" while ignoring tips about murderers, spies, and terrorists. Read that here.]

Man, if only the Pentagon put as much effort into winning the war as it does into rebranding its losing efforts.
Remember when GWOT (Global War On Terrorism) became GSAVE (Global War on Violent Extremism). Well, at least that's what Donald Rumsfeld proposed back in 2005. Evidently, even Bush thought this was stupid.

As for the "long war"this one was coined by Gen. John P. Abizaid before he retired as head of the Central Command. According to the NYT, "it was intended to signal to the American public that the country was involved in a lengthy struggle that went well beyond the war in Iraq and was political as well as military."

Except, whoops, folks in the Middle East took it to mean that they'd be occupied for a long time. The Times also notes that U.S. officials seem to be using the phrases "Islamic fascism" and "jihadist" less regularly, as they seem to have offended Muslims worldwide, and even helped recruit folks to fight us. (D'oh!) The Pentagon has also dropped "Salafist Extremist Network," presumably because only Juan Cole knew what it meant.

"We continue to look for other options to characterize the scope of current operations," said a Pentagon spokesperson.

 Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a grand jury investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. His trial also implicated top political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney in a campaign to discredit her husband, Iraq war critic and retired ambassador Joe Wilson. Libby, who plans an appeal, is awaiting a June 5 sentencing.

 Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is fighting to hold onto his job in the face of congressional investigations into his role in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Two top aides have resigned in the investigation into whether the firings were politically motivated. Emails and other evidence released by the Justice Deparment suggest that Rove played a part in the process. Other e-mails, sent on Republican party accounts, either have disappeared or were erased.

 Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank and a former deputy defense secretary, acknowledged he helped arrange a large pay raise for his female companion when she was transferred to the State Department but remained on the bank payroll. The incident intensified calls at the bank for his resignation.

 J. Steven Griles, an oil and gas lobbyist who became deputy Interior Secretary J., last month became the highest-ranking Bush administration official convicted in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal, pleading guilty to obstructing justice by lying to a Senate committee about his relationship with the convicted lobbyist. Abramoff repeatedly sought Griles' intervention at Interior on behalf of Indian tribal clients.

 Former White House aide, David H. Safavian, was convicted last year of lying to government investigators about his ties to Abramoff and faces a 180-month prison sentence.

 Roger Stillwell, a former Interior Department official, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for not reporting tickets he received from Abramoff.

 Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the top Justice Department prosecutor in the environmental division until January, bought a $980,000 beach house in South Carolina with ConocoPhillips lobbyist Donald R. Duncan and oil and gas lobbyist Griles. Soon thereafter, she signed an agreement giving the oil company more time to clean up air pollution at some of its refineries. Congressional Democrats have denounced the arrangement.

 Matteo Fontana, a Department of Education official who oversaw the student loan industry, was put on leave last week after disclosure that he owned at least $100,000 worth of stock in a student loan company.

 Claude Allen, who had been Bush's domestic policy adviser, pleaded guilty to theft in making phony returns at discount department stores while working at the White house. He was sentenced to two years of supervised probation and fined $500.

 Philip Cooney, a former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist who became chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, acknowledged in congressional testimony earlier this year that he changed three government reports to eliminate or downplay links between greenhouse gases and global warming. He left in 2005 to work for Exxon Mobil Corp.

 Darleen Druyun, a former Air Force procurement officer, served nine months in prison in 2005 for violating federal conflict-of-interest rules in a deal to lease Boeing refueling tankers for $23 billion, despite Pentagon studies showing the tankers were unnecessary. After making the deal, she quit the government and joined Boeing.

 Eric Keroack, Bush's choice to oversee the federal family planning program, resigned from the post suddenly last month after the Massachusetts Medicaid office launched an investigation into his private practice. He had been medical director of an organization that opposes premarital sex and contraception.

 Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, attended a luncheon at the agency earlier this year with other top GSA political appointees at which Scott Jennings, a top Rove aide, gave a PowerPoint demonstration on how to help Republican candidates in 2008. A congressional committee is investigating whether the remarks violated a federal law that restricts executive-branch employees from using their positions for political purposes.

 Robert W. Cobb, NASA's inspector general is under investigation on charges of ignoring safety violations in the space program. An internal administration review said he routinely tipped off department officials to internal investigations and quashed a report related to the Columbia shuttle explosion to avoid embarrassing the agency. He remains on the job. Only Bush can fire him.

 Julie MacDonald, who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service but has no academic background in biology, overrode recommendations of agency scientists about how to protect endangered species and improperly leaked internal information to private groups, the Interior Department inspector general said.

The last time I checked, singer Sheryl Crow and environmental activist Laurie David were Americans, just like me. But according to Karl Rove, he does not have to answer to them because he "works for the American people." Rove was approached on Saturday night by the stars and asked to discuss the president's environmental policy (or lack thereof).

Citizenship issues aside, Deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino scolded Crow and David for not showing respect to George W. Bush.

(Here is where I take a break so I can recover from Perino's statement. Why on Earth would anyone who has been paying attention for the last six years want to show respect for Bush? And, as Think Progress says, "...the last time we checked, Karl Rove is not the president.")

But I digress. Perino's next zinger was even better: "The president's record on climate change is very strong."

Right. It is so strong that he has all but demolished the Environmental Protection Agency, encouraged falsification of scientific reports on global warming, removed reports that indicate the seriousness of global warming and the harm being done by pollutors, backed out of the Kyoto agreement, and lied about reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Mother Jones had a little fun with cocaine in March. Or, what I meant to say was, Mother Jones had a little fun reporting on cocaine in our March/April issue. Jokes aside, we contended that the ambitious and expensive plan enacted in 2000 to eradicate Colombian coca by aerially spraying crops has not significantly reduced cocaine production or the availability of the drug in the United States. In fact, we indicated that as much as 40 percent of the sprayed crops are not coca at all, but rather rainforest or food crops.

Today's American Prospect online augmentsMoJo's admittedly jaunty foray into the white stuff. Based on the personal stories of peasants in Colombia's cocafied southern districts (well worth a read) and a report released—albeit belatedly—by the State Department itself, the article reveals that even the government's own numbers demonstrate that Plan Colombia hasn't made a dent in the drug trade. And that peasants will continue growing cocaplanes be damneduntil they are provided with another way to earn money. And they need more, rather than less, money every time their food crops are destroyed.

Let's hear an Amen for Sandro Calvani, director of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in Bogotá, who observes, "You cannot change a dysfunctional social-economic situation by force alone The only way to make elimination sustainable is to convince people to make a new life plan. The people must be at the center of the change."

But Calvani's common sense is Bush's anathema. In fact, the Bush administration is increasingly spending its massive Colombian aid package on attempts to corral the cocaine-funded FARC guerrillas, rather than on aid to poor coca farmers or more effective eradication efforts. TAP reports that, while FARC has indeed retreated, the conservative Colombian government is forming ever-tighter alliances with the paramilitary death squads originally formed to fight the guerillas:

Also funded by cocaine and considered terrorists by the State Department, paramilitary forces have fast become some of the country's largest drug traffickers. In other words, U.S. taxpayer money meant to fight the drug trade is funding allies who are, in part, fueling it.

But because the rest of Latin America can't stand Bush, he's stuck with Colombia's corrupt, right-wing, human-rights abusing government. Wow, it feels like déjà-vu all over again! Get ready: We may have to attack Colombia 20 years from now.

Tomorrow, Pat Tillman's mother and brother and Jessica Lynch will testify at a congressional hearing focusing on the inaccurate reports of Tillman's friendly fire death in Afghanistan and Lynch's capture and rescue in Iraq.

The Tillman family has been butting heads with the military for years now, all in an effort to get a straight story about Pat's death, and Lynch has openly said that her rescue, once called "one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived" was overblown. Should be an interesting hearing.

We covered Lynch in the Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline. See all entries relating to her here. The link provides a pretty good summary of that whole embarrassing drama.

I blogged on Friday that the U.S. military was beginning construction of a 3-mile long wall to separate the Sunni neighborhood Azamiyah from the Shiite neighborhoods that border it. The story gained traction over the weekend (the New York Times and McClatchy, among others, covered it). A protest scheduled for today also turned up the heat, and Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki put his foot down.

Al-Maliki is touring Sunni countries in hopes of shoring up some regional support for his ailing Shiite government, and, in a joint press conference with the secretary-general of the Arab League, said authoritatively, "I oppose the building of the wall and its construction will stop." American military officials wouldn't confirm that construction would stop, TIME reports, "saying only that all security measures were constantly under discussion." However, the U.S. military did cede to the PM's wishes in October, when al-Malikisensiblyobjected that barricading off Muqtada al-Sadr's stronghold, Sadr City, would be a recipe for disaster. Al-Maliki's suggestion this time also seems like a winner, since both Shiites and Sunnis oppose construction of the wall.

The Prime Minister, loyal to his American king makers, showed great restraint in alluding only vaguely to the obviously catastrophic history suchbarriers have had.